The Cromulent Economics Blog

January 29, 2013

Would the NRA support this government funded field experiment?

From the InDecision blog ("the new blog set up by and for younger researchers in the field of judgment and decision-making psychology"):

This week in our interview series is Richard H. Thaler, Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. ...

A research project I wish I had done… My phd thesis was on the value of saving a life. The idea was to estimate how much you had to pay people to get them to accept a small increase in risk. So, I did an econometrics exercise regressing wages on occupational mortality rates. But the really clean study to do, as suggested by my buddy Richard Zeckhauser, would be to get people to play Russian Roulette, with a machine gun with many, many chambers (say 10,000). Then tell people there are 5 bullets in the gun, how much would you pay to remove one, or accept to add one. For some reason, no human subject committee has ever been willing to approve this project. Can’t imagine why! (Before I get into trouble, this was intended as a joke.)

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Would the NRA support this government funded field experiment?

From the InDecision blog ("the new blog set up by and for younger researchers in the field of judgment and decision-making psychology"):

This week in our interview series is Richard H. Thaler, Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. ...

A research project I wish I had done… My phd thesis was on the value of saving a life. The idea was to estimate how much you had to pay people to get them to accept a small increase in risk. So, I did an econometrics exercise regressing wages on occupational mortality rates. But the really clean study to do, as suggested by my buddy Richard Zeckhauser, would be to get people to play Russian Roulette, with a machine gun with many, many chambers (say 10,000). Then tell people there are 5 bullets in the gun, how much would you pay to remove one, or accept to add one. For some reason, no human subject committee has ever been willing to approve this project. Can’t imagine why! (Before I get into trouble, this was intended as a joke.)

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